Apple to Unveil IPad 2 on March 2 in San Francisco
kara.allthingsd.com
kara.allthingsd.com
Apple’s time-to-market in tablets has generated at least five key advantages for the company:
1. Apple has locked up the market for critical components, including 60% of the global supply of 10” touch capacitive screens.
2. The company is much further along the learning curve in tablets, with refined hardware and software as well as more efficient production through its partnership with Foxconn.
3. Apple has achieved significant economies of scale to drive down per unit costs, having already shipped and sold 15m+ iPads.
4. The company has developed a sizable collection of complements in the form of apps and content (via iTunes) and physical accessories.
5. Apple has generated strong brand awareness around the iPad, given the limited competition for consumer mind share in this market.
These aforementioned advantages build upon Apple’s already significant, corporate advantages in the areas of technology, distribution (e.g., retail stores), customer service, and overall brand recognition.
Credible Android-based tablets will arrive soon. For instance, the Motorola Xoom is due to hit stores this Thursday. However, it may take some time (measured in years) for competitors to catch up to Apple in this market.
later this... week?
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/21/visualized-motorola-xoom-...
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/20/motorola-xoom-up-for-in-s...
Someone looking to buy a $500 iPad might well be put off by a $600 price tag on another tablet. On the other hand, someone looking to buy a $700 iPad (or even a $500 iPad plus a $30 case for it) probably won't be, I wouldn't think.
You'll be interested in tablets when also-rans catch up to obsolete tech. Apple's move pushes video interfacing toward the middle of the 21st century, not the latter 20th.
with that regard i prefer android for syncing to my music library. And the Xbox360 beats the pants off the AppleTV.
Itunes is the cable that holds this platform, at least where i see it, Itunes is obsolete.
I'm personally excited for Mobile Hi-definition Link which Samsung is rolling out right now to high end phones. It makes the standard USB micro connection do double duty as video out and can power your device from the TV at the same time via a single cable. Should make big screen gaming using the mobile device as a combined controller and game console a lot more viable.
It is of course an industry standard, rather than some Apple-only proprietary cable, dongle or licensing scheme, which I thought we had moved past.
I personally decided I was tired of this behaviour when they made a crappy copy of FLAC and even stole the name (they just took out the "Free" and replaced it with "Apple", how appropriate) instead of just using it as-is. There's plenty of other examples.
FLAC, ALAC who cares. They both do what it says on the tin Lossless Audio Codec.
Apple does what Apple does and the world can certainly support more than one type of system. They go off and do their own thing and have been punished and rewarded for it.
A tablet does not need HDMI. The average user would never use it. If you are waiting for HDMI for a tablet...you are doing it wrong. Get a 100$ apple TV thats always plugged into your computer and control it with your iPad as an amazing touchscreen remote.
Think presentations. One of the first things my girlfriend asked my about the iPad was "can I plug it into a projector and run presentations?" To her this was the first use that came to mind. I imagine she isn't the only one. More and more projectors are coming with HDMI as standard and being able to plug in your tablet directly without worrying about needing to buy a separate adapter will be a boon to many people.
A $500 tablet certainly can't replace my $400 (used) laptop.
I'm a writer, a touch screen tablet where a usable keyboard obscures my work area (IE being able to see what I have written) makes the device useless for work. It becomes solely a glorified ebook reader with the added perk that I could actually edit something should I want to go through an excessive hassle of dealing with no keyboard.
It's fundamentally changed the way I do things too, I no longer buy a daily paper, i just grab my Times subscription every morning, read books on it and stream shows/films via Air Video Server and a host of other fun stuff.
Find me an Android tablet that can compare and I'll consider that.
If there was an iPhone available for every carrier and it cost $20, then nobody would be using Android except the hard-core Linux hackers (like myself).
I am not complaining about this situation at all, as I love Android and hate Apple, but let's be honest as to what is actually going on. Cheap crap = sales.
That might well be true, but it ignores the reality of the facts that there isn't an iPhone available for every carrier for $20, and that Android devices are presently outselling it.
Cheap crap = sales, but you don't get to pretend that those sales don't count just because they involve cheap crap.
I wouldn't count them as much, though. A really large number of Android phones get sold to people who don't want to buy apps.
Or maybe that doesn't matter if you're not a mobile developer. But was there some other relevance to the whole iOS vs Android spiel that was brought up in the parent comment? Because attracting developers is the only thing I can think of that would make OS marketshare matter at all.
But never mind Android, the dominant phone OS is still Symbian although nobody would say it is "leading the way".
Important to who and why? I'm not disagreeing, but I don't think it hurts apples profits much at the end of the day. I'm waiting to see how android manages to cope with the divergence of devices that will be running on it.
With iPad, there's no such issue. Essentially nobody is trapped in a long-term contract they'd have to break if they buy an iPad.
Apple could afford to release information that far in advance, because it didn't replace an existing Apple product and there was no competition from other vendors. This year, the situation is different. I'm willing to bet that the second gen iPad will be available within 5 weeks of its announcement. (If I'd have to guess, I'd say Saturday, April 2.)
I expect the iPad 2, if announced on March 2, to ship before the end of March.
Because that's the way Apple usually rolls.
Unlikely. Apple has moved just about all of its non-computer release cycles to yearly (iPhones have been yearly from the start, iPods have been slowly moved to the yearly September event). April at the latest.
And note that Apple has yet to announce anything (they probably won't announce the iPad 2 ever, they'll just go "hey here's the iPad 2" one day, as they generally do for product refreshes).
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/ipad
It's not scientific, but Apple generally tries to clear inventory of the current model by selling brand new units as "refurbished" through their online store a week or two in advance.
By the way, this method of predicting when an Apple product is about to be updated has never steered me wrong in the past.
That means if someone can get their act together and catch up in just 1 year, they can lock up a still enviable #2 spot. I'm talking about having good execution on the device, the software, and a competing set of complements.
Not only does Apple engender the love of many, it also garners much dislike. This amounts to a huge resource which can be leveraged for marketing.
"Tim? Hey, problem. Bloomberg just put some nonsense out about slipping dates. Getting traction."
"Ok. Get Mossberg on the phone."
An Apple exec can pick up a phone and give Mossberg a few actual facts (a bit hidden in the subtext of inquiring about his health, let's not be too overt), I don't think there's anything in that which would go against his ethics policy. Though I may have missed that section.
Shower time is my last refuge from the Crazy Info Stream. I relish the thinking time.
I have been using Penultimate (notebook-like app where you can scribble with a stylus) to lay out nearly all of my ideas. Because I develop algorithms as well, only being able to type (as on a laptop) is not good enough for me. I need to be able to jolt down diagrams/drawings with a pen/stylus all the time. I can immediately email any of my notes/diagrams (or the entire notebook) as a PDF file to collaborators that I have in my Contacts list in the Mail app. I don't have to carry around several unwieldy notebooks in my bag anymore. The only things I carry in my messenger bag now are: MacBook, iPad, vacuum flask with hot coffee (if the workstations at work were Macs, I wouldn't even have to carry the MacBook). No more paper!
The iPad has VPN and an SSH app, so away from work I can login and view how my clusters are doing.
1. PDFs are much easier to read on a vertical-format screen unless said screen is very large (would need to twist modern wide-screen laptops sideways). Also, I prefer that my reading device is not heavy and that it is small enough to read while on standing on public transportation -- this way I can get heads up on things before arriving to work.
2. The ability to annotate documents directly using finger input is amazing (I am not talking about handwriting -- I am talking about yellow-highlighting passages and keywords without using the classic trackpad and cursor combo which requires a stable platform for it to be usable).
3. The ability to just take the PDF/document/notes/whatever and bring it over to my boss next door is irreplaceable. Laptop is too heavy and cumbersome to hold with one hand, and email/file-sharing is cumbersome as well -- bosses are generally unwilling to listen to their subordinates tell them to open this or that file while they are in the middle of something on their screen. This is why most offices have stuck with paper for so long -- it is great to be able to carry something in your hand and just show it to somebody across the floor. Likewise, it is easier for my boss (who also has an iPad) to just show me some document without having to print it or email it to me or walk me over across the lab to his computer.
The importance of this is under-recognized.
A friend realized it is much cheaper to just pre-load an iPad with demo software and mail it free to a prospective client, than to fly to said customer and arrange for meeting times and persuade them to load & run software on their computers. Open an envelope, turn it on, start using the product - send us a check and we'll keep it on and send you more. "$500, it just works" is _cheap_ for what it buys.
What do you use as a stylus? I've tried Penultimate but using my fingers is extremely clumsy.
I'm a software engineer by day, and a software/hardware hacker at night also working on my own start-up. I require reference to be easy and without lag. Once I build up a flow of thoughts and ideas that I've compiled from a list of sources, I like to be able to reference them and organize them without having books lying about everywhere.
I recently learned Objective-C pretty rapidly by having access to multiple books at the same time and consuming them in parallel. When I would have trouble understanding one concept in one book, I would move to another book that could explain the concept better to me. So I was book-sourcing my learning.
iBooks is sufficient for this, but I've been thinking about building my own tool that processes information the way I do and keeping the journal handy.
My set-up is (left to right): 27Inch Cinema Display, iPad on stand, MacBook Pro.
I use my cinema display for coding and browsing, the macbook for logs/stderr/stdout, and I use the iPad as a book reference. So I can flip back and forth around the iPad if I need to, or I can take my iPad to another workspace on my workbench and not have to deal with lugging my laptop around.
I've just been holding out for a lighter version. I think the original ipad is just a bit too heavy.
It's one of the nice side-effects of selling DRM-free books: they don't need an app that has the DRM baked-in -- you can use iBooks or any third-party reader.
Furthermore, I'm never on vacation and think, Oh, I'd love t read up on RoR... I usually already have the book.
(okay, there are some presentation glitches, but it works well enough)
If you create an account, then go to that URL and enter the ISBN of your book you're then given the option to upgrade it to an eBook for $4.99.
I will most likely sit this one out.
A Retina display would do it, but it sounds like that's not happening this time round.
FaceTime? I already have a couple of devices that do FaceTime.
Thinner or lighter? It would have to be significantly lighter before I'd even consider it.
So I'm quite sure I will stick with my original iPad, at least until v3. It's a killer device that's completely changed the way I read, the way I watch TV, the way I spend my "leisure computing" time, and the way I listen to music at home, and I'm certainly very happy I jumped in early.
Also, if it could handle pen input and finger input sensibly. There are hacks for iPad stylus input, but they're all a little unwieldy, especially if you want to rest your hand on the device.
If it really is as thin as rumoured I'm impressed.
[1] most race conditions will only trigger on a uniprocessor system if preempted, which is fairly unlikely if the racy data accesses are close together.
SDK < iOS5, likely, if they decide to play it safe (or some kind of attribute in the bundle). I highly doubt Apple is going to fork iOS again for no reason at all, 4.3 has yet to be released and iOS5 is 4-5 months away tops.
Right now, it's likely that a lot of bugs are not showing themselves regularly, so nobody has bothered running any diagnostic tools (Helgrind, etc.)
Once you deal with one large deep difficult highly concurrent project, you get used to the idea that when there are threads and mutexes involved you have to think REALLY HARD about how it should work, and you can't rely on just trying something and testing it like you can with normal code. And if you do that, you can get threads to work pretty reliably, not just by chance.
[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/iPad/#documentation/G...
Also GCD is relatively new to iOS, and not the only concurrency API in Cocoa, so yes many apps will still be using (and will continue to use) traditional threads.
Furthermore, GCD has only been around since iOS 4.0, so if your app needs to be compatible to 3.x, you can't use it.
I honestly think they made the resolution only 1024x768 on purpose to reduce the amount of time it will take to be able to cost-effectively double it. If they had shipped with a 1280x800 screen (like the Xoom's) off the bat, it would probably tack on an extra iteration before they could double it.
The 'Retina' display would definitely be a huge leap forward but can they make the screens iPad size for a reasonable cost yet? From what I understood that wasn't possible.
Camera is a no-brainer addition. Facetime/Skype video on an ipad would be amazing. I am starting to offload tasks from my computer to my iPad and this is another I would like to do. I already Skype on the iPad while working on my computer.
There is a charm to having trivial tasks, anything well suited to the app world, on a separate device than your computer. Somewhat like an extra monitor...but even more detached.
I know it's been released in April, but that's just in the US. It arrived in the rest of the EU at the end of July (and I bought mine in September).
Of all things Apple could release more often, they pick the iPad...
As an iPad 1st gen owner I hope at least they would release some attachable iSight camera for the iPad. Because video calling is about the only thing I would want it to do in order to be a decent Skype station.
Personally I've found little value in the iPad. A pocketable iPod Touch is perfect for light email reading, quick browsing, and Skype calls while a Kindle is much nicer for book reading. Furthermore, these two added weigh less than the iPad!
Feature list:
- front facing camera - "retinal" display - iPhone 4 style designing